Camera And Action, page 19
The scrawny and sickly Ratso, like Hoffman's question-mark physique on the July cover of Life, gave "picking oneself up by the bootstraps" a humorous and pitiful sadness when applied to the bus headed to paradise. The film fit with the 1960s idea of moving beyond traditional relationships and offered audiences a chance to re-evaluate the nature of male identity as drawn by the Western and its reliance on a specialized buddy code constructed in American cinema. Joe validates Rizzo's significance by legitimizing his pursuit of happiness and by showing that a man can draw emotional support from another man. In turn, independent Ratso leaves his grifting. Joe finds his aspiration - to attract women through his cowboy studliness - an oppressive ideal because, in the "get-up," Joe existed outside of experience.22 Miami allows Joe to shed the "cowboy crap" fantasy and find manliness in his resourcefulness. Considering the underlying theme - that Joe was under the influence of imagined identities and universal icons such as Paul Newman and John Wayne -Joe's education, the truth about the consequences of iconic embodiments of American ideals, came from experience. Thus, Joe's presumption about westernness ends when he returns to work, to his task of caretaking rather than living an identity defined by other sources.
Midnight Cowboy was the first successful mainstream film to question the consequences of the historical construction of masculinity through the Western, but the issue transcended the matter of construction. The film asked hard questions about male identity and the use of the Western to contain and control the meaning in male experience. It did so through a new story about the damage done to a young Texas man who identified himself through the potent image of strong actors. Sex failed because it was a business for the experienced, not the mistaken. The film resonated because it was not the exchange of goods nor the hustling enterprise that brought reprieve; it was showing an emotional exchange that lifted two men out of their squalid environment. If anything, it asked viewers to recognize the value in those identities often derided and denigrated, if not typically abused.
By shedding Western garments, Joe Buck refuses "to accept the terms in which the dominant culture has chosen to define [his] reality." Side by side, the nouveau blond from Texas, paired with the dark-haired Italian from the Bronx, share a history of oppression and humiliation. At this point, Joe and Ratso recognize each other's vulnerability as their own. Drawing power through helplessness, these characters echo the popular "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" mantra. Hence, the screen opened wider for those who could transform what was once a cause for guilt into personal and eventually political power as a new tradition of masculinity was available .21
The possibility of rethinking concepts of men at the end of the decade was simple enough for most, but others argued that Schlesinger avoided the seriousness of social pressures on men to conform to convention. Schlesinger was booed at the Berlin Film Festival for not taking the film far enough in critical social issues.24 Detractors accused him of avoiding the subject of Vietnam and reviewers suspected that the exaggerated attention to the friendship's platonic nature was evasive. Male bravado and repression would suggest the issue was latent homosexuality or was it identification with a universal concept and idea of love between men that was neither concealed gayness nor personal denial?25
Roger Ebert complained that the film "comes heartbreakingly close to being the movie we want it to be" with the painfully accurate performances of "America's underbelly," but "there has been a failure somewhere in the director's faith in his materials. John Schlesinger has not been brave enough to tell his story" and has dragged these memorable characters into "an offensively trendy, gimmick-ridden, tarted-up, vulgar exercise in fashionable cinema." The result is nothing short of a "soap opera" about the "urban jungle." It was the "sloppy psychology" and failed character development that weakened "a movie that could have been great."26 Likewise, Joseph Gelmis wrote, "There was more attitudinizing than character development. "27
Schlesinger has been criticized for perpetuating homophobia by stereotyping gayness and denigrating that identity in Midnight Cowboy. The argument is well taken considering Joe's last desperate attempt to save Rizzo by stealing money from the conventioneer. This especially offensive act, critics accused, allowed Joe off the hook at the expense of a gay patron he had just brutalized if not killed. As one British comment went, "Joe may forget about the telephone he has rammed into the mouth of the badly bleeding queer, but surely we are not expected to forget as well."28 Schlesinger denied that he set out unequivocally to bash gays. He repeatedly explained that the film was not about the characters' latent or obvious gayness. Having just come out of the closet himself, he was more interested in reshaping conventional narratives than collapsing personal experience into yet another commodified identity. He insisted the film was about "how two men can have a meaningful relationship without being homosexual. "29
Even as late as 2006 he explained: "It was viewed as somewhat antigay, which I'd never intended ... but ... if you look at it with a ... gay sensibility and want everything to be positive about gay life, it could be interpreted as antigay." His real and only intent, as he commented, was to make a film about love between two men and undertake "a theme that had never been really tackled before."30 As it was, because the relation between Ratso and Joe remained uninhibited, asexual, non-erotic, and un-sensual to many audiences, the film carried well its essential burden of questioning the universal influence of American westernness. Otherwise, Schlesinger risked making this specialized story unambiguously a gay film and the sex scenes exploitative nudity. Some critics, for example, applauded the director's refusal "to patronize his characters" and romanticize their relationship as "pure." By refraining from a good homosexual/bad American society split, Rizzo and Buck became part of "a realized world," thereby "uniting diverse audiences with them."31 Avoiding the more blatant sexual direction than the book, Schlesinger made room for artistic ambiguity and direct address of the debate about masculine identity.
Thus, it would be a stretch to say Midnight Cowboy is an emblem of gay rights or even an attempt to humanize homosexuality. The critical point of arguing the film's impact and meaning did not lay in that discussion. Since the gay rights movement had not yet formally mobilized and, with the Stonewall Riot still a few months away at the time of production and release, sympathy for homosexuals' civil rights was yet to garner strong public attention. In addition, how far American society was from homosexual acceptance can be measured in the unselfconscious use of denigrating language in the film script and in critical comments such as New York Times' Vincent Canby when he casually writes, "Joe Buck ... comes to New York to make his fortune as a stud to all the rich ladies who have been deprived of their rights by faggot eastern gentlemen."32
Receptive audiences responded to the disparagement of the romantic myth of the cowboy, the effects of the top-down impact of the media, and the exposure of male hustling, but those interests would not explain the litigious nature of the picture that angered film critics such as Roger Ebert. If anything, this film measures the divisions over identity, power, and social relations.33
Yet, Joe Buck's restored humanity provides a means of agency, of choice. He becomes a person, not an unenlightened dupe reacting to false aspirations nor a straw man merely responding. The film allows a personal touch to come through Rico Salvatore Rizzo's street cynicism. A reconstituted innocent and a redefined cynic made intimacy possible for men. "I'll just tell 'em -you want me? I don't go nowhere without my buddy here," Joe asserts. Hence, what was threatening about this film was its attempt to define masculinity outside of the standard John Wayne discourse without choosing its opposite. Midnight Cowboy added a question mark to traditional representations and the meaning of popular personae. The story connected the most available notions of masculinity to the personal experience of the two characters.34 The source of strength shifts from the silent man on a horse to the pair of outcasts on the bus heading south. The rugged individualist recedes from view as the bus stops at their destination. Vulnerability and the profound experience of dependence affirmed a new ethos, a code of conduct reserved now for men.
Western icons were potent tropes for debate about identity as proven by True Grit and Midnight Cowboy running within months of each other. In the Academy's choice of nominations for best actor a year later, the pull of that debate can be further felt. Though the latter is not a Western, its appropriation of the genre's signifiers defines the intersection where the narrative of progress and masculine individualism met the challenges to these dominating patterns. Midnight Cowboy, therefore, contested the quest of the rugged Western individualist by asking viewers to consider the consequences of such an ideal when it functions as a form of repression. Its "Now Movie" realism on the streets of New York City drew audiences in; the superb performances of Hoffman and Voight confirmed that one more cinematic boundary could be pushed by sixties agency.
Released a year after the new ratings system (G, M, R, X) in 1968, the film defined the meaning of an X rating while avoiding the category of pornography. Fans saw it as "one of many groundbreaking films made during a period when there really was no `official' watchdog over the content of American films and ... was acclaimed as the kind of quality `adult' film the X was supposed to allow." Critics complained that the radical dream ended somehow in 1969 and that Jack Valenti's system was co-opted by 1975 when X-rated films meant pornography. Divesting directors of more possibilities for X-rated films seemed like a "backlash against the `excesses' of the '60s" and seemed to open the door to pornographers to coopt the legitimacy of the X rating.35 As one viewer commented, "Those of us who loved `Midnight Cowboy' in its first release saw a whole new potential in American movies ... but ... now ... we feel a sadness ... for a brave new world that was promised yet somehow slipped away." 36
The X or R debate is moot if the film, indeed, broke ground and influenced future filmmaking. Midnight Cowboy's original rating says more about the difficult subject matter of gender than about its emblematic promise to lead film out of dark ages of control. Americans' resistance to unconventional representations of the Vietnam War and popular culture's inability to portray gay identity with dignity provide the allegorical play in Midnight Cowboy. They are the shifting grounds of debate about how mainstream cinema approached masculinity beyond the totalizing image of the individualist Westerner. A new persona depended on audience empathy with familiar victimization claims in top-down stories, balanced out by selfreliance. The film refused to identify Ratso and Joe as merely victims of society and chose instead to indict something else. It gave a chance to those who feel "everybody's talkin' at" him or her to be less peculiar. The brilliance lies in bringing together the acting, the candidness, and the vision to make Waynesian eyes watch another option for male relationships at the turn of the decade.
If United Artists felt the film was risky, the film's popularity cannot be explained by its subject matter alone and, if American society were in the midst of instead of at the beginning of debates about masculinity, the box office would have produced different results. Similarly, the place Midnight Cowboy has held in cinematic memory shows its cultural worth, for it is neither the filmmakers' decisions nor the intent that provides historical evidence for the film's social agency but the reception and afterlife. In hindsight, original viewers confirm that we still care about these lost souls - the "weaselly, hobbling Ratso is the original American icon of homeless despair." The "preening faux-cowboy stud" and their "peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife" allows Midnight Cowboy to ride again, vivid and disturbing.37 From the vantage point of the "unsentimental '90s," as Washington Post writer Desson Howe remarked, and despite the film's "unrelenting grimness," it was still "somehow ... all wonderful to watch."38 Reviewers agreed by the film's anniversary that it still stands as a classic.
Just in case American kids listened too intently "to the echoes of" the American dream, a British director was there to caution them, but the film took on a life of its own, through Hoffman's greased-down hair and Voight's cowboy garb. References to the two have appeared in everything from orange juice commercials to Disney's Hercules, an SCTV spoof, and as the name of a fingernail polish. If anyone cares to travel to The Monarch in the city of Ooty in Tamil, India, for a Taj holiday, one can find "a discotheque that captures the timeless essence of a typical Western atmosphere and ideal gathering place for friends." Called "The Midnight Cowboy," this bar offers snacks and the finest spirit and wines with the latest music for those mavericks vacationing in India.39
Even in political discussions, the film serves as a historical reference point. During a panel debate held on December 20, 2006, about the role of Hollywood in spreading anti-Americanism, law professor and author James Hirsen held John Wayne as the standard for American ideals. "In the past," he pointed out, "Hollywood provided a positive American image to the world - back when John Wayne as a cowboy exemplified ruggedness, independence and fairness, but films such as 1969's Midnight Cowboy ... represented a turning point in American cultural representation of the cinema."40
In an interview on CNN News in August 2003, Anderson Cooper asked The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell about his article on the disappearance of sex in current film. "No," said Mitchell, "there's this real fear of dealing with adult sexuality in movies. Movies are now teasing about sex. They're sexy without being sexual." Cooper asked him to "go back to 1969" to Midnight Cowboy. Mitchell explained it "was a movie about male prostitutes, and it was more the material than the actual picture itself ... this movie that didn't shy away from the fact that sex was messy, complicated. Adults ruin their lives by it." Mitchell further pointed out, "And that was the year of `True Grit,' a year of ... staid, quiet, boring, all-square Hollywood movies."41 The discussion circled back to the same questions about American identity and masculinity represented in John Wayne's iconic status, Midnight Cowboy's iconoclasm, and Life report of the polarization of America.
The event that brought back the debate more directly, however, was Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain in 2004. "Is Brokeback this year's Midnight Cowboy?" Emanuel Levy asked on his website in his article "Oscar 2005 -Midday Cowboy," and his answer was yes.42 The echoes between the two are striking. Thirty-six years after Schlesinger's release, Ang Lee takes us back to rewrite a fantasy about what might have happened had Midnight Cowboy been a love story about two gay men. Brokeback's characters are portrayed as cowboys, called cowboys, wear cowboy hats, ride horses, and carry ropes, but they do not fight Indians, beat up outlaws, sleep under the stars around a campfire, nor hustle on the streets of Times Square. Instead, they "herd" sheep, "gather" them, and go fishing. They are not pursuing the American dream like Joe Buck and Ratso and they make love in the idyllic setting of lush, pastoral mountains next to clear, crisp river water. As Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman jested, the film "is less a movie than a chunk of American landscape."43 Personalizing open country in a narrative that looks back on the 1960s as a historical reference point, the filmmakers adjusted the lens of history and imagined social processes developing differently.
Brokeback's social agency exists on the boundary-pushing that critics such as Elvis like to see. Boundary breakers hype film's progressive ideal as the last frontier for creativity in the social and political context of making money. If a film like Brokeback gets made in the context of the same-sex marriage debates and at the pinnacle of gay rights, it ceases to operate as an allusion but stands as an agent in social change. Thus, when Brokeback Mountain appropriated traditional western mythology to challenge male identities and relationships, it proved a safe bet in 2006. John Wayne was dead, Robert Redford had already built his empire from western iconography, and the only Westerns young audiences watched were Clint Eastwood's revisionists or possibly reruns on "Nick at Night." Memories of families watching "Bonanza" in living rooms and playing cowboys on plastic horses faded with boomers aging. To strike a cord with Western analogies and allusions would be esoteric. Besides, if intimating that the Western cowboy struck a nerve, it was because variations of the Western ethos had become a hot commodity in popular culture. Ranging from country music to Madison Avenue's Ralph Lauren $1200 cowboy attire to bull-riding on cable networks and the NRA's professional competitions, Western identity plays out still on another surface, a potent battleground for gender debates and Americanness.
The delicate balance Schlesinger achieved between innuendo and straight storytelling gave the film the power to be successful at the box office and sustain itself in film history. Yet, landmark as it was, Midnight Cowboy competed with a more potent attraction by the 1970s. The other male genre, the war story, that was invested as deeply in patriarchal relations and traditional gender roles as the Western, was the next target. Robert Altman debuted a transitional film just months after Midnight Cowboy earned its viewer and critical admiration. While audiences were getting a taste of the hustling life in Manhattan, others were waiting to see two United States medics in Korea shake off sacred cows in M*A*S*H. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould sealed the deal for the new war look on the silver screen and had a heyday reconciling counterculture ideas with the shifting meaning of masculinity and social roles in America. These medics were not the Ben Caseys or Dr. Kildares that boomers grew up watching on television. Rather, they were the military's nightmare - independent, rebellious, but experts in their practice. Through their antiestablishment extremism, the gender debates took yet another turn.
Fox didn't release `MASH.' It escaped.
- Robert Altman after the Cannes Film Festival
The film is so thoroughly American that one fears it may not be justly evaluated abroad.
- Thomas Quinn Curtiss in a review for M*A*S*H.
Following the Academy Awards in 1971, Twentieth-Century-Fox publicized Frank J. Schaffner's Patton and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H in one advertisement, side by side. "Winner! 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screen Play, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Art Direction, Best Set Decoration; both proudly presented by 20th Century-Fox," the ad read.' Oscar stood stately in the middle of the advertisement with George C. Scott as General George S. Patton on the one side and an image of a woman's two naked legs topped with a man's hand giving the piece sign on the other.
